All posts tagged reflections in glass

14 July 2018 – Given my severely modest school grades in math, it is very odd that I am so fascinated by lines & shapes, as I wander around town. You’ve met this fascination at least twice before — in Recti/Curvi-Linear and in Geometry at Work & Play — and here it is again.

I’m downtown on Burrard and, as I eye a group of towers reflected in another tower …

I think: “Vertical!” More precisely, Jagged-Vertical, as tends to be the case with reflections.

Somewhat later, I’m on a bench in Emery Barnes Park, enjoying the sound & sight of the fountain at one end of the long watercourse that runs the length of the park to a waterfall at the other end.

I don’t know why it makes me remember the reflected office towers, but it does. That in turn makes me think about verticals and horizontals, and the other lines and shapes of the built city. And the way each category has its variations.

More than one kind of vertical, for example. A fountain, I realize, is Arching-Vertical.

Now that I’m looking for lines & shapes, I see the connecting watercourse with a different eye.

Never mind the sparkle of the water, the colourful mosaics in the canal bed. I’m alert to shape, and this is Horizontal. No, wait a minute: it’s Downtown-Horizontal with Pigeons and Park-Bench Feet.

I sit on my bench, watch park life for a while. Despite signage that this is not a wading pond, small children & indulgent parents think it is a wading pond, and behave accordingly.

and, a short ferry ride later, to arrive at Spyglass Dock, with its distinctive Woolly Vertical.

I sink into a Muskoka chair for a bit, and listen to a teenage girl improvise some jazz on the dock piano while I admire the Verticals (all that real estate across the water) and Horizontals (the waters of False Creek) shining in the mid-afternoon sunshine.

I catch myself trying to calculate the angle of the ferry dock ramp, and how to capture the vegetation in a suitably geometric description. I start to laugh.